Study Guide

16 Pages·2017·0.21 MB·English

Study Guide
God
A Human History
by Reza Aslan
Random House | HC | 978-0-553-39472-6 | 320pp. | $28.00
Also available as an E-Book
“Reza Aslan offers so much to relish in his excellent ‘human history’ of God. In tracing the commonalities that unite
religions, Aslan makes truly challenging arguments that believers in many traditions will want to mull over, and to explore
further. This rewarding book is very ambitious in its scope, and it is thoroughly grounded in an impressive body of
reading and research.” —Philip Jenkins, author of Crucible of Faith
about the book
In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive
attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize
God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are
aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think
about God is a divine version of ourselves.”
But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our
compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these
qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments.
More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse
in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human
History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives.
about the author
REZA ASLAN is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions whose books include No god but God: The Origins,
Evolution, and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He is also the author of How to Win a
Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism),
as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles with his
wife and three sons.
Random House Academic Resources, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
www.randomhouseacademic.com • www.commonreads.com
QUERIES: [email protected]
chapter summaries
introduction: in our image
Research shows that children, regardless of whether they come from religious family
backgrounds, conceive of God in terms of a human being with superhuman capacities. Their
tendency to imagine “up” from human to divine and to imagine God as a super-human figure
echoes German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who suggested that humans’ tendencies to
anthropomorphize God stems from an innate desire to see God and God’s divine characteristics
in terms of humans and human characteristics.
In other words, the human brain inherently conceives of the divine in human terms. Human
spirituality, from the earliest days to contemporary times, can be understood as a series of
efforts to understand the divine—whether conceived of as one God or many gods—by putting
divine attributes, motivations, and even physical aspects into human terms.
Humans’ ongoing efforts to humanize God and the divine are not an indication that God does
not exist; they are better understood as pointing toward one consistent, common metaphor for
understanding the divine: the “humanized God.” Even Islam, which explicitly rejects ascribing
human properties to God, is full of anthropomorphizing elements; humanizing God appears to
be a universal impulse.
Efforts to humanize the divine encompass ascribing to God all the best elements of human
nature—generosity, love, compassion—as well as all the worst—jealousy, vengeance, violence.
These efforts in turn work to add a divine aspect to those attributes—legitimating them, in some
cases, and the human behaviors that they engender. Religious conflicts can be understood as
the consequence of humans first ascribing human attributes to God and then taking divine
legitimacy from the desire to act on human jealousy, desire for vengeance, or capacity for
violence.
Can humans resist the impulse to humanize God and develop a more pantheistic
understanding of the divine—one in which God is commensurate with the natural world, rather
than with humans alone? Could this reconceptualization support a more peaceful and less
human-centric form of spirituality?
I. the embodied soul
Adam and Eve in Eden
Adam and Eve might most effectively be imagined as paradigmatic representatives of homo
sapiens, who began migrating from Africa around 100,000 BCE. Both hunters, they make their
tools and trade their skilled creations for carved objects and pendants.
They bury their dead, a labor-intensive process made more “costly” by their efforts to lay out
the body and to include valuable objects in the grave. They commemorate the dead person
with rituals—fires, offerings, stone markers, visitations. These practices are taken as signs that
Adam and Eve, the earliest homo sapiens, recognize themselves as embodied souls—with an
understanding of the soul as a distinct, separate element of the person that persists after the
human body perishes.
Adam and Eve understand the soul as a spirit and see the world as permeated by spirits. Spirits
inhabit and animate every element of creation, from birds to rocks. They consider themselves
to be connected to creation and see the natural world—including themselves—as part of one
organic whole. This unifying viewpoint is characteristic of animism, likely the earliest human
expression of what we later call religion.
The records left by the earliest humans are filled with indications of their spiritual beliefs—
especially the painted caves that stretch from Southeast Asia to Western Europe, of which the
Volp caves in the French Pyrenees are one of the most important examples. The caves must be
understood in the context of animist religious practices: they are sacred spaces, not dwelling
places.
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The images found within these caves remind us that early humans saw the world as divided into
thirds: an ordinary world of earth, a subterranean world of the underground, and an upper realm
of spirits and divinity, accessible only with the help of a shaman or other mediating power. The
cave paintings suggest not random decorations, but a carefully laid out pathway, for physical and
spiritual purposes, with images serving as symbolic guides to the humans who moved through
these cave spaces for spiritual purposes. The cave paintings do not represent the existing world
or middle-tier earth; they served to help point humans toward the upper, spiritual tier. It might
not be too much a stretch to think of them as a physical, visual iteration of scripture.
At the end of the Volp caves, in what has been dubbed “the Sanctuary,” is the caves’ most
significant image. It is a human-animal combination: with the lower half of a human man, but
with the upper torso of a hybrid animal: an owl’s eyes, stag deer’s antlers, as well as a horse-
like tail. It is painted and engraved in the cave walls and appears to have had been drawn and
redrawn over the years. The French archeologist, Henri Breuil, who re-discovered the caves in
the modern era, assumed that the figure represented a shaman and christened it “The Sorcerer.”
However, this is a misunderstanding: like the many other human-animal hybrids that appear
on cave walls across Europe and Asia, this figure was not meant to represent an actual human
dressed up with animal parts. Like the other paintings, its role is symbolic: the figure is one of
the first images that humans created to represent God.
The Lord of Beasts
The human-animal hybrid image found in so many cave paintings around the world represents
one of the earliest and most universal human understandings of the divine: God as Lord of
the Beasts, who rules over animals and the forests. Later conceptions of God, including Ahura
Mazda, Shiva, and even Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, all include references to the powers held by
the Lord of the Beasts.
The figure of the Lord of the Beasts also represents the evolutionary human understanding
of the divine, from the animism of prehistoric humans to a much more complex set of beliefs
centered around one or a small number of gods. It also points to the deeply rooted nature of
the religious impulse in humans, reaching as far back as the Middle Paleolithic Period (41,000–
200,000 years ago), and with some material evidence to suggest religious practices among
Neanderthals as well. Some archeological evidence suggests ritualized grave practices for homo
erectus that date back nearly 500,000 years. (More complex religious ritual practice seems to
have developed in the Upper Paleolithic, 10,000–40,000 years ago.) These finds suggest that the
religious impulse dates back to the moment that humans became human—or before.
What the evidence suggests is that religious belief should be considered a defining,
foundational part of our experience as humans. We are homo religiosus as well as sapiens,
characterized by our sense of ourselves as embodied souls and our sense of the world as having
some divine transcendence. From a scientific perspective, this could mean that religious belief
is an evolutionary asset, or an adaptive advantage.
In the nineteenth century, several European anthropologists attempted to identify the
adaptive advantage that religious belief provided, using a Darwinian model. Many came to
the conclusion that religion helped humans by providing answers to questions that otherwise
appeared unanswerable and by instilling a sense of order and meaning on an unpredictable
world. Yet comfort or a sense of meaning is not itself an evolutionary asset. Further, there is
no human emotion unique to religion, suggesting that religious belief does more than provide
humans with a sense of meaning. Other scholars, like Emile Durkheim, suggested that religion’s
role was social: it bound communities together through ritual acts, which helped communities
survive. However, religious feelings and beliefs have historically been as divisive as they have
been unifying; religion works by excluding as well as including. Finally, psychologists like
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung suggested that the human soul was better understood as the
individual psyche and reduced the religious impulse to violence, trauma management, or wish
fulfillment. But religion afflicts as much as it comforts; the idea that religion promotes morality
is quite recent in human history.
In short, it is likely that religion is not an evolutionary asset in and of itself. Cognitive science
increasingly suggests that it is the outcome of an earlier adaptive advantage.
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The Face in the Tree
Cognitive science suggests that a biological process termed the Hypersensitive Agency Detection
Device (HADD) has played an important role in promoting religion as a foundational human
activity. HADD pushes humans to interpret unexplained events as the product of human agency,
and thus as having a human cause—or, at least, an animate one. This impulse is what encourages
caution at an unfamiliar sound in the night, or a shadow in a parking lot. But it also suggests the
basis for humans’ belief in God or the divine.
The cognitive science of religion argues that the religious impulse is neurological in origin. This is
true of every impulse and does not deny the legitimacy of religious belief—it simply explains the
process—but it suggests that the origins of the religious impulse lie within the human brain.
Cognitive science also argues for the importance of the cognitive process known as Theory of
Mind, an executive brain function that encourages humans to understand other humans—and
non-humans—in terms that relate their actions, thoughts, motivations, and impulses back to the
self. Hence humans assume that others will act, think, and believe the way they do—and, also,
assume that dolls, animals, statues, or anything that looks sufficiently “like me” to them, will as well.
HADD and Theory of Mind connected historically and today, scientists theorize, to produce the
belief among early and contemporary humans that just as they had souls, so must other beings—
including trees, rocks, and animals.
Presumably, HADD and Theory of Mind produced many individual iterations of this process, with
individual humans seeing spirits in particular objects. Those that gained traction and took hold
among communities, however, all seem to have been perceived as useful: a tree that speaks and
can tell the future, for example; or a human-animal hybrid that could control the hunt. The most
successful iteration of this, throughout human history, is that of the god-man: a human who is
elevated above others in terms of knowledge or abilities, but who is also still recognizably human.
Cognitive science thus provides compelling arguments for the emergence and adoption of
particular human concepts of divinity. It has yet to explain successfully how or why the earliest
humans believed that they had souls. What this suggests is that the origin of the religious impulse
in humans is our belief that we are embodied souls: that we are more than our physical bodies,
and that our souls persist after our bodies perish. It is this foundational impulse that laid the
groundwork for all human efforts to conceive and understand the divine.
II. the humanized god
Spears into Plows
The Biblical story of the Garden of Eden is generally understood today as a myth—a symbolic story
that helps explain to believers why the world is the way it is. Like the many flood narratives found
across the ancient Near East, the Garden story falls within a category called “folk memory”—a
universal myth that developed from a society’s collective memory. In the case of the Garden, it
addresses questions of why humans struggle to produce their own food, why women suffer in
childbirth, and why humans do not have divine beings as daily companions. In doing so, it invokes
the memory of a time when human life was relatively easy. Historically, this time correlates with the
period in human history before settled agriculture—when most humans were hunter-gatherers.
Near Urfa, considered the closest historical example to the Biblical Garden of Eden, the oldest
religious temple sits at Gobekli Tepe. An elaborate complex, the temple features complex
carvings of animals mixed with geometric designs and abstract symbols that are presumed to
communicate through an as-yet untranslated symbolic language. This complex was created
between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago, by hunter-gatherers living in the Stone Age—and appears
to have drawn worshippers from afar, bringing different tribal affiliations and different gods.
What brought them together was the unifying concept of the humanized god, represented by
the multiple carved, t-shaped pillars at the center of the temple complex. Given the cognitive
processes of HADD and Theory of Mind, it is unsurprising that these early humans conceived of
the divine in humanized form.
One consequence of humans’ tendency to humanize the divine is that we also project our
characteristics upon them. If we experience jealousy, our gods will likely do the same. If we value
altruism, we will likely see the same attribute in our gods. We build temples to shelter our gods
because we as humans need shelter, and so on. We will construct religious rituals and practices
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to honor them—and it is this that pushed Upper Paleolithic humans to invent agriculture and to
abandon the nomadic hunter-gatherer life for the settled one.
Humans were foragers—hunters and gatherers—for almost 2.5 million years, or almost all of
human history. They conceived of gods as gods of the hunt. Yet around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago,
humans as a species shifted from hunting to farming, from scavenging for found food to growing
and producing it. Farming changed humans from masters of space to masters of time, and from
focusing on gods in the sky to gods in the earth (which itself seems to have involved a shift in
gender, as sky deities were generally male while the earth was conceived of as female). The myths
associated with them also changed—stories about fecundity and fertility, stories about consuming
the body of a god through eating the produce that grew from his broken body.
The introduction of agriculture brought about far-reaching changes: it encouraged permanent
settlement, fostering the rise of cities. It promoted the efficient division of labor, enabling social
stratification and the accumulation of wealth. Yet the switch was not necessarily positive:
agriculture was far more costly in terms of time and human labor than hunting. It seems to have
caused a sharp decline in human consumption of vitamins, minerals, and protein, while leaving
humans far more vulnerable to disease and early death. Given the evolutionary disadvantages, why
did humans leave the relative ease of hunting and gathering for the difficult drudgery of farming?
The material evidence from Gobekli Tepe and other sites suggests that previous assumptions
about the relationship between agriculture and human settlement were inverted. Humans did not
settle and found cities because they had shifted to farming; they formed permanent settlements
and only turned from hunting to farming over a longer period of time. It seems plausible that this
process was connected to the rise of organized religion. The human effort required to build and
maintain temples, and to carry out elaborate ritual practices, pushed settled hunter-gatherers to
cut the time needed for food foraging, whether by penning hunt animals into a smaller space to
make it easier to obtain meat, or cultivating whatever plants grew wild nearby to supplement their
daily meals. Farming and animal domestication thus emerged ad hoc as a response to the daily
needs of settled life.
However, the shift from these ad hoc efforts to a full commitment to agriculture suggests more
than convenience—it suggests a “revolution of symbols,” as French scholar Jacques Cauvin
explains. Humans’ belief in humanized gods in turn seems to have elevated human ideas of
their own position within creation: no longer simply one element among others, but increasingly
understanding themselves as the center and pinnacle of creation. Hence mastering nature,
transforming nature, became characteristic of a newly-conceived relationship between humans
and the rest of the natural world.
Lofty Persons
Flood narratives are some of the oldest and most universal stories in human history—and seem
to date to ancient Sumer, the first great human civilization, located in the Fertile Crescent. The
Sumerians founded what is regarded as the world’s first major city, Uruk, around 4500 BCE. They
followed this with a series of critical inventions: the wheel, the sailboat, and human writing. They
were thus the first Neolithic civilization to write about their religion, among other subjects, and
writing—narrating—seems to have had its own particular impact on how the gods were envisaged.
Ilu, the Sumerian word for “god,” meant “lofty person,” and gods were conceived as human in form,
dress, emotion, and behavior. Just as ilu became Elohim in Hebrew and ilah, then Allah, in Arabic, so
did the Sumerian understanding of gods as super-humans influence the communities that used
those words.
Mesopotamia’s Sumerians envisioned a pantheon of gods, each with his or her story and
specialties. The richness of the Sumerian divine community is a reminder of the complexity and
sophistication of polytheism, and a testimony to how the religious impulse had evolved in the
7,000 years since Gobeli Tepe. It seems also to have coexisted with the practice of venerating one’s
ancestors—especially in hopes that they might intercede on behalf of their living relatives—which
may also have provided the original incarnation of some Mesopotamian deities.
Several Mesopotamian gods were considered incarnations of the forces they influenced—hence
Shamash was understood as both the god of the sun and the sun itself. The major gods were
also considered linked to a particular city-state, with temples that were considered their home or
shelter on earth; the linkage afforded an early instantiation of the powerful connection often drawn
in later eras between polities and gods, or polities and sects. Many gods were represented by idols,
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the continuation of a Paleolithic development. But while the idol was understood to effectively
and accurately represent the god, it was not considered the sole instantiation of that god. Idols
channeled the divine, but did not exhaust it.
In ancient Egypt, gods were consistently represented as part human, part animal, a practice
distinct from that of the Sumerians. The animal pointed to some of the god’s function or power;
but the gods were described in human terms—as having human characteristics and attributes, not
animal ones. Indo-European gods were described in terms of nature—sky god, fire god, etc.—but
also depicted with human characteristics and with very human behaviors. The humanization of
even the most abstract gods—what would the sky look or act like, after all?—seems to have worked
in tandem with public ritual and other religious practices to render gods comprehensible to human
beings—as epitomized by the Greek gods.
In ancient Greece, the gods began as the personification of natural forces as well but evolved
into divine iterations of human characteristics: love, war, wisdom, and so on. Their relationship to
one another evolved into that of an extended family, and for this they were criticized. Could gods
truly be gods when their behavior was so clearly on the same level as that of non-divine humans?
Some Greek thinkers, like Xenophanes, argued that religion must embrace the idea of non-human
gods—and not gods, but one god. One, singular, non-human god would remind humans of the gap
between human and divine, and of the unity of the natural world. The monad, the Pythagorean
ideal, would be echoed by the religious conception of one, dehumanized god; but while compelling
in its theoretical purity, this concept found very few adherents.
The High God
One of the most intriguing experiments in monotheism—the positive affirmation that there is
only one god, and the negative rejection of any other—came under Pharaoh Akhenaten (born
Amenhotep), of Egypt’s New Kingdom. Taking office in the mid-1300s BCE, he ruled a polytheistic
kingdom in which one incarnation of the sun, known as Re, had successfully merged with a city-
state deity, Amun, to become the dominant king-god Amun-Re. But Akhenaten preferred an older
incarnation of the sun god, Aten—the Sun Disc—which seems to have been personalized into what
in later eras would be described as a theophanic conversion experience.
While many pharaohs preferred one god over others, Akhenaten insisted on worshipping Aten
and no other. He changed his name to honor Aten, moved the dynasty capital to a newly-built
city dedicated to Aten and, within a few years, declared worship of any other god illegal. While his
repressive efforts limited public worship of other gods during his lifetime, upon his death, Aten’s
temples were demolished, monotheism was declared a heresy, and Akhenaten’s tomb and legacy
were attacked. This first human attempt to instill monotheism in a society was an utter failure.
Around 1100 BCE, the world witnessed a second effort at monotheism, via the teachings of the
Iranian prophet Zarathustra. Generally assumed to be a member of the Iranian priestly class,
Zarathustra abandoned his post in early adulthood and began wandering on a quest to discover a
deeper knowledge of the gods. He was struck by a light and the presence of an unknown god who
identified himself as the one and only god—not first among many, but the sole divinity. Zarathustra
called him Ahura Mazda, “wise Lord,” but noted that the god had no name. Zarathustra was
charged with transmitting a revelation from this god, which he then wrote down as the foundation
of the Zoroastrian scripture. As the first human to fulfill this cycle of divine revelation, human
scribing, and human transmission, Zarathustra served as the world’s first prophet.
As with Akhenaten’s efforts, Zarathustra’s efforts to spread the word of this new god met with utter
failure. It became a success only several centuries later, when the Achaemenid Empire adopted
it—with major changes—as its court religion. The six evocations of the unnamed god in the world
became six divine beings, the “Holy Immortals,” and the two emanations of good and not-good or
evil that Zarathustra explained as inhering in Ahura Mazda became two battling deities. As pure
monotheism, Zoroastrianism failed to gain an audience. As dualism, it succeeded.
Monotheism dominates the religious expressions of the contemporary world but is a historical
anomaly: belief in one, sole, singular deity has been the conception of any human community for
only 3,000 years, and a minority view for much of this time. While monolatry—the worship of one
god without rejecting others’ worship of other gods—has been relatively common, monotheistic
experiments routinely failed. It failed because monotheism does not accord well with humans’
impulse to humanize the divine. How would one god be born? What characteristics would one god
have, when its experiences were so alien to human experiences? How could one god encompass all
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the various needs of human life for which humans prayed or supplicated to various gods?
With monotheism came the innate connection of the one sole God with the powers of judgment
and of the enforcement of morality, as well as the consequent notion that the world of the dead
would be a sorting-out space, rather than a continuation of life on earth. Zarathustra’s description
of Ahura Mazda as the locus of human morality and the determiner of whether humans would end
in heaven or hell was revolutionary.
Humans seemed eminently capable of endorsing the idea of one high god—much like a king
or other overlord on earth—who governed the other gods. Henotheism, the worship of one god
without denying the existence or worship of other gods, appears to have become the dominant
form of religious conceptualization across ancient civilizations because it accorded well with
human expectations of a hierarchical society. Each civilization appears to have understood its
divine pantheon in light of its own political order—politicomorphism, or the divinization of earthly
politics. As politics on earth changed, people in each civilization over time began to understand
their gods differently, moving from a more democratic to more hierarchical order. But distributing
various divine attributes among more and less powerful gods, and even piling on additional
attributes to the high god, does not lead to monotheism.
If super-charging a high god with human attributes does not lead to monotheism, what about the
Greek approach: dehumanizing god? A god stripped of all human qualities, emotions, motivations,
and actions seems to be devoid of appeal to most humans. How can humans connect with such an
alien divinity? Only in a crisis might a community be willing to put its faith in one, singular god, with
no human relatability.
III. what is god?
God Is One
Somewhat like the association of particular gods with ancient city-states, tribes in the Ancient
Near East maintained covenants with one particular god—a contractual relationship in which
the tribe worshipped the god and the god in turn protected the tribe. Battles and wars were thus
understood less as tribes fighting one another than gods competing to determine which was
more powerful. The Babylonian destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, then, could
understandably have been interpreted by Israelites as the destruction of Yahweh as their god.
Instead, a small group proposed a new way of conceiving of divinity.
The Hebrew Bible depicts the ancient Israelites as worshipping two different deities: Yahweh, who
appeared to Moses, and El, a Canaanite deity worshipped by Abraham and other patriarchs. The
first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch, are a composite, with each book assembled
from different sources (hence, for example, the contradictory elements within the flood narrative
in Genesis). The Yahwist material is textually older, but the Elohist tradition focuses on an older
deity—and one historically much better known. El was the High God of the Canaanites and the
original god of the Israelites; the “el” of Israel refers to El.
While the Israelites’ self-narrative distinguishes them from polytheistic Canaanites, some
scholars believe that the Israelites were originally a Canaanite clan that broke away from the larger
community, maintaining some elements of Canaanite culture while developing a distinct identity.
As with the Canaanites, the early Israelites likely practiced monolatry, worshipping El as a high god
without rejecting the existence of other gods. Even the Biblical condemnation of Israelite worship
of other gods testifies to the non-exclusivist stance of at least some Israelites.
For the Israelites, the adoption of monotheism came only after the merging of El, the Canaanite
god of Abraham, and Yahweh, the Midian god of Moses. In part, these seem to have reflected
regional differences, with Yahweh worship located in the southern part of Canaan and El
worship centered in the north. After the kingdom of Israel was established around 1050 BCE, the
merging process continued, with the names of Yahweh and El often joined together. As Israelites’
conceptions of their gods evolved to reflect their new political reality—a monarchy—Yahweh-El took
on the role of high god or divine king, ruling over heaven and other gods. The Ark of the Covenant,
representing Moses’ covenant with Yahweh, was placed in the newly built temple, and a national
cult developed around Yahweh.
While Yahweh’s status continued to rise, this did not translate to monotheism. The Israelites and,
in particular, their kings worshipped Yahweh but seem to have little concern over what other
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peoples worshipped. They considered Yahweh the superior god, not the sole god. But when
Nebuchadnezzar’s forces overthrew Jerusalem, suggesting that Marduk was the stronger god, the
Israelites had a choice. Some transferred their loyalty to Marduk. Others followed what became the
first expressions of pure monotheism in the Hebrew Bible: the claim that Yahweh was the sole god.
Monotheism for the Israelites emerged from the political and spiritual crisis of identity wrought by
military defeat, in a world in which defeat was generally seen as the defeat of one’s god. Judaism in
its monotheistic form emerged as the testimony of faith after political defeat.
Judaism’s monotheism also resolved the problem that made Xenophanes’ monotheism so
unappealing. The God of Judaism was both singular and personal, dehumanized but creating
humans in God’s own image; both radically different from humans in God’s immortality but like
them in terms of emotions and motivations. This was a game-changing development in the history
of human religious expression.
God Is Three
The Christian addition to the Bible, known as the New Testament, begins with four Gospels,
testimonies about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Three of them—Matthew,
Mark, and Luke—are considered to derive from similar source materials. The fourth, John, tells a
very different story, with different elements and a different timeline, and contains the first clear
statement that Jesus is to be considered the human incarnation of God. The word he uses is
Logos, a Greek philosophical term describing the primal, divine force of creation, and his argument
is that this force took the form of a human man.
In some ways, this articulation of the status of Jesus fit within older Greco-Roman conceptions—
including the fairly standard practice of deifying defunct or living emperors and the older Greek
notion of the demigod. This practice could also be seen in the ancient practices of divinizing
human mediators—priests, prophets, mystics, and other redeemers. Judaism stood out among
religions in the Ancient Near East for its lack of deified humans.
The humanization of the divine could be understood as the obverse of the practice of divinizing
humans. Yet the deification of Jesus was something different: Jesus was described as the one and
only human manifestation of the one and only God, rather than one god-man among many. This
was a controversial idea, even among Christians, and canonical church positions—of which there
are multiple—developed only over time and with much debate.
For several centuries, Christians remained divided regarding whether Jesus was part of God or
a second God and, if the latter, what the two gods’ relationship was. Marcion considered Jesus
and Yahweh opposed: the latter a cruel creator god, full of pettiness and vengeance; and Jesus
the Logos, loving and merciful. Unable to see the two as connected, he conceived of them as
enemies—a position that also supported the early Christian movement in its efforts to distinguish
itself from Judaism. Marcion’s views found no supporters in Rome, but his followers formed a large
Christian sect that continued until the 400s CE.
Why would the early Roman church have worked to preserve the idea of monotheism? Emergent
Christianity was already distinct in many respects from Judaism, so what value did Jewish
monotheism have? Looking through the lens of politicomorphism, it appears that one key reason
was that reaffirming the Jewish concept of one, sole, singular God supported the emergent Roman
structure of a church united by governance under one bishop—the Pope.
In 312 CE, Constantine had his famous dream, which he believed promised him the imperial crown
in exchange for adopting Christianity. As emperor, he legalized Christianity and seems to have
considered monotheism as its key tenet. It must have been surprising to him to learn of the many
debates within the church, on the nature of Jesus as well as on what Jesus’ relationship was to
God. Constantine seems to have had little interest in debate and much in unity. He convened the
Council of Nicea in 325 CE, which established the compromise position that Jesus and God the
Father shared one substance.
Based on the writings of Tertullian, the Nicean compromise position described God as a substance
with three distinct but commensurate manifestations: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and
the Holy Ghost. Thus, the doctrine of the trinity was born. This position raised further questions:
were the three manifestations equal? Did one precede the others? Augustine’s work provided what
became the definitive Church position: the three forms are part of God’s eternal being, co-equal
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with one another, and the believer’s task is to embrace and accept this divine mystery. The Council
of Chalcedon in 451 CE confirmed these positions and added what became the Roman Catholic
position on the nature of Jesus Christ: that Jesus was both truly and completely divine and truly
and completely human.
God Is All
By the early 600s, the two major powers in the Near East—the Roman Christian Byzantine Empire,
and the Zoroastrian Sassanid Persian Empire—had been rivals and co-combatants for centuries.
Their battles were inconclusive but incessant; each fought for political supremacy, bolstered by a
distinct religious ideology. They were confronted in 630 CE by the message of a religious reformer
based in the Arabian peninsula: Muhammad, known to his followers as God’s final Messenger.
The rise of Islam and of Muslim-led military bands, who defeated the Byzantines and the Persians
in the 640s, can be seen as the contestation of an insistent monotheism—God as one, based
on the Judaic model—against Roman Christian trinitarianism and Zoroastrian dualism. It was
understood by its adherents not as a new religion but as the religion of Abraham and Adam—and
thus the call to Islam was seen as a call to return to the worship of one God, against the seductions
of polytheism, whether understood as multiple gods, a triune God, or two gods.
Muhammad, son of Abdallah and grandson of Abd al-Muttalib, was born in the late 500s CE in
the town of Mecca. He lost both parents at a young age and was raised by his uncle; recognized
as a capable and trustworthy man, a wealthy widow some years his senior proposed marriage.
Yet despite his secure social and financial position, Muhammad remained concerned about the
social inequities and injustice that characterized Meccan society, which had grown wealthy as
pilgrims came to worship at the Kaaba, the black building that, Islamic tradition holds, held idols
of over 300 gods. He frequently retreated to the hills outside Mecca to meditate and reflect; as
Muslim tradition has it, it was on one of those retreats that the Angel Gabriel appeared to him and
instructed him to “recite”—to repeat the words of God that Gabriel transmitted.
Allah, meaning simply “the god” in Arabic, was a term for the divine that already circulated in
Meccan society. Arabs believed that Allah had created the heavens and the earth and thus
functioned as a kind of high god, who—like Zeus—had children and companions in the pantheon
of Arab gods. Arab gods were much like Greek gods, with human desires, behaviors, and actions,
and associated with particular powers or characteristics. However, Arabs were also familiar with
Judaism and Christianity; representations of Abraham, Jesus, and Mary were included among the
idols worshipped by pilgrims to the Kaaba.
Hence, Muhammad’s declaration that Allah was the one and only God would not have been
entirely revolutionary, nor necessarily offensive to Mecca’s inhabitants. Allah was described in
terms familiar to the Arabs: as creator, lord, and master of fate—which fit with Islam’s message.
However, Muhammad’s message was one of exclusive monotheism: Meccans were called not
only to recognize God as one, but to reject every other god. This was an attack on the henotheistic
worldview as well as Mecca’s economy, which was based in part on pilgrim trade.
Muhammad’s message also shifted Meccans’ understanding of God by directly connecting Allah
to Yahweh, identifying them as one and the same God. It was the same God, whether known as
Allah or Yahweh, who made the covenant with Abraham, appeared to Moses, sent the Angel Gabriel
to Mary, and so on. The scriptural history of the Jews, and of the Christians through the death of
Jesus, was thus refigured as part of Meccans’ spiritual heritage as well. Presumably, Muhammad
as well as most Meccans were well aware of Judaism—and likely also of eastern forms of
Christianity. Hence the Qur’anic assertion, repeated over and over, that God is one and indivisible,
neither begotten nor begetting. And hence also the Qur’anic style of narrating Biblical stories:
rather than retell the story of Moses in narrative form, for example, it references the highlights of
the story—expecting listeners to remember the rest.
Monotheism in Islam echoed the Judaic form, but became more emphatic: God was not just one
in numerical terms, but also in essence: God’s essential nature was oneness, as well as God’s form.
This was not only a critique of Christian trinitarianism and Arab polytheism, but a foundational
statement about the relationship between God as Creator and all creation: God is radically other
than God’s creation, from an Islamic perspective, in nature and in form. Yet while Islam does not
suggest that humans are created in God’s image, the Qur’an and Islamic tradition are suffused
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with anthropomorphizing descriptions of God—physical attributes (the ability to sit on a throne),
embodied elements (hands or a face), and emotions or motivations (mercy). While many Muslims
have interpreted these references metaphorically, this runs against the grain of human inclination
as well as of the fundamental principles of Islamic legal interpretation, which assume a meaning
and a purpose to the words themselves, because they are the Word of God.
Islam presents a particular challenge to believers in this respect. If God is radically other than
God’s creation, and yet is described in the Qur’an as having physical and intellectual/emotional
attributes, then those attributes must somehow be part of God. If God is indivisible and eternal,
those attributes must be an essential part of God, and be eternally part of God. Thus, if creating
is one of God’s attributes, is God truly separate from what God creates? These philosophical
questions run deep for some Muslims, while others have dismissed them as “babble,” or theological
pontificating. Yet the idea of God and creation as connected is what inspired many impulses
toward Sufism, the spiritual or mystical approach to connecting with God through ritual practice as
well as study to unlock what Sufis believe are secret truths that help believers to understand God.
Sufism is an internally diverse, multi-faceted set of approaches. However, collectively, Sufis
attempt to address some of the most universal questions about God: is God an animating principle
joining together all living beings? Is God the deification of nature? An abstract, depersonalized
force? A deified human? For some Sufis, the answer emerged from the Islamic concept of God’s
unity: If God was a unified being, God’s creation must also be a unity. God must be both one and
all—a concept known in Arabic as wahadat al-wujud, the Unity of Being. This concept, which is
espoused by some Sufis, argues that Creator and creation share the same inseparable essence—
eternal and indivisible. God is the collective sum of all existence—the Creator and creation together.
conclusion: the one
The Jewish scriptures and Old Testament tell the story of the Garden of Eden, in which Adam and
Eve are banished from Paradise after eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Their banishment has been understood as punishment for disobeying God, and more accurately
for trying to obtain the knowledge that would allow them to become like God—or to become God.
Humans today have lost the understanding of our early ancestors: that humans are the image of
God in the world, in essence if not in form.
The Sufi concept of the unity of being, which erased any perceived difference between Creator
and creation, is expressed today in the modern concept of pantheism, which means that God
is all and everything, or that everything and all is God. In other words, there is no division or
separation between God and the universe—they exist together, as God, because nothing can exist
independently or outside of God. The world is God’s essence, or self-expression. Pantheism can be
found in varying forms and articulations in most religious traditions, from Hinduism to Christianity.
It can also be found in strains of western philosophy and in science and its unifying conception of
nature: energy and matter are inseparable, for example.
Today, many people conceive of God as a dehumanized, non-material divinity, with no humanizing
characteristics. Forming a meaningful relationship with this concept of God is particularly
challenging: our brains are designed to connect with a humanizing concept of God. Perhaps our
focus should instead be on recognizing the relationship that already exists. The dehumanization
of God goes hand in hand with the assumption of an essential difference and unbridgeable chasm
separating God and humans. Recognizing that humans—creation—are the manifestation of God
removes the chasm. Worshipping God thus involves less fear and trembling and more awe and
wonder at the majesty of the universe—at God’s self-expression.
Understanding the universe as God imbues all of creation with a divine aspect. Knowledge and
understanding of God comes from knowledge and understanding of creation—including of
ourselves. This process should start from, and be rooted in, a focus on the soul. Belief in the soul
as separate from and persisting after the body is our first and most fundamental belief—known as
substance dualism. Our belief in God derives from this belief—not the other way around. We are
born believers; it is our choice whether and how we remain believers. There is nothing implausible
about the existence of a spirit that animates the universe—each individual spark of creation as well
as the world as a whole. Belief is a choice and a challenge for us all.
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